The goal of this two-day international conference to be held on May 20th and 21st 2004 in New Hunt's House, King's College London is to highlight recent advances in the structure and function of proteins in muscle. Muscle is the most abundant tissue in the human body and its proper function is essential in many aspects of health. Deterioration of muscle function is a prominent symptom in ageing, heart disease, atherosclerosis and such devastating genetic diseases such as muscular dystrophy. Much of our current understanding of muscle and of contractile and regulatory mechanisms of muscle stems from the sliding filament hypothesis that was formulated fifty years ago. One of the four co-authors in the two Nature papers that marked the formulation was Dr Jean Hanson. She went on to become Director of the Randall Institute (now the Randall Centre, sited in New Hunt's House). This conference celebrates her scientific contributions and the research that has followed from her work. It focuses in particular on the filamentous proteins, actin and myosin, and their associated proteins to which she made such notable and seminal contributions during her career before her premature death in 1973. A principal aim therefore of the conference is to attract and enhance the interest and commitment of young, and especially women, scientists to muscle research. The meeting will be a combination of talks by internationally recognized scientists and young scientists, and of poster presentations. Scientific themes will concentrate on structural mechanisms involving proteins of the thick and thin filaments in muscle. A remarkable outgrowth of research in muscle is the way in which techniques developed to investigate its structure, mechanisms and development have pervaded so much of biological studies involving extra and intracellular movement. Approaches include single-molecule nanotechnology, synchrotron radiation and the genetic basis of disease, all of which will be exemplified in the topics discussed at the conference.